Enterprises are finding it increasingly difficult to stay abreast with the rapidly evolving technology platforms. That is, software and hardware upgrades are commonplace for an information technology (IT) infrastructure of an enterprise and maintaining a state of the art infrastructure is costly, time consuming, and distracts from the business of an enterprise. But, there is no avoiding technology and the enterprise's business is intimately dependent on its underlying infrastructure. So, an enterprise is in a catch-22 position and is forced to maintain a costly IT infrastructure.
One thing is for certain, the amount and types of devices supported by an enterprise are ever expanding and along with this situation are a myriad of metrics and log information that the enterprise knows is useful but struggles to intelligently leverage and use.
Similar to Moore's Law, the proliferation of hardware devices and software services increases the amount of diagnostic information in log files and as events each year. Even with the consolidation of multiple, special purpose devices into smart phones and netbook computers, there are more and more of those devices, along with physical and virtual appliances and the hosts that run them and support them. An enterprise is challenged to understand how to manage all of the new information that comes from these devices and their relationships and how each event and log record relates to each other and to other aspects of a data center.
For example, it may be very obscure that a power fluctuation caused a fault to occur in a router resulting in the failure of a single record update in the enterprise product catalog. Without an understanding of the sequence of events, a lot of time may be wasted trying to evaluate the update failure or router port failure when actually the problem rests with the power conditioning equipment for one segment of the power distribution system within the data center.